


The Grand Tour

by breathedout



Series: Widows' Walks [1]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Consent Issues, F/F, Performative Self-Presentation, attempted murder as a seduction technique, canon-typical obsession with death, enmity to codependency, extremely self-expressive extremely about death, murderous girlfriends, overly authorial dream sequences, playing fast and loose with Soviet history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 10:57:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2465753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She could have gone for your throat. Cut your jugular, left you bleeding out on the floor, you didn't think about that?"</p><p>"Yeah," said Natasha. "I thought about it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Grand Tour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dayadhvam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dayadhvam/gifts).



> Hey [Dayadhvam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Dayadhvam/pseuds/Dayadhvam)! I hope you like this little Natasha/Yelena fic! Thanks for the impetus to write this pairing: I'd been wanting to for a while and as expected it was a total blast.
> 
> General note: "The Grand Tour" is an interstitial story that takes Natasha and Yelena from the end of _Itsy-bitsy Spider_ through the beginning of _Breakdown_ , so it's canon-compliant and very engaged with those two volumes. If a reader added the single word "anymore" to a key moment in _Name of the Rose_ (and assumed NotR came after both other stories), it would also be canon-compliant with that one. And those... are the only comics I have ever read! \o/ So I'm sure there are discrepancies with other Black Widow arcs, not to mention with other volumes in the Marvel universe. As a habitual research-hound and historical-fiction-writing perfectionist I feel compelled to apologize for my lack of expertise in this area. 
> 
> Also, possibly surprising note for people who read my other stuff: this story contains no on-screen sex! Though it gets somewhat close. The Mature rating is primarily for violence and potentially disturbing non-explicit erotic themes. 
> 
> Thanks to the fine folks of [Antidiogenes](http://antidiogenes.tumblr.com/) for their stalwart encouragement, and, as always, to [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash)/[fizzygins](http://fizzygins.tumblr.com/) for the cheerleading and past-the-last-minute proofing. She is a queen among women and a worthy writing and drinking partner in this universe or any other.

**Zürich**  
**January, 1998**

Just choreography, of course. A gun lowered, a hand outheld. Yelena's wide blue eyes and then the impact at Natasha's own back: exquisite ballet under a Zürich pier. On stage there had never been room for hesitation, and so she pivoted; spun; folded down graceful to the ground with her head coming to rest on Yelena's thigh. Splayed out like Gudonuv dead in the lap of his heir, with Yelena's fast-breathing stomach against her cheek and Erich in his balaclava looking down on them from above: stagecraft. Yelena held her close, vibrating, with a gun in her hand. When they were alone again Yelena wished her happy birthday in a voice younger than any she'd let Natasha hear; touched her neck and took her phone and kicked her into a freezing lake and behind Natasha's eyes there was a flash of something... dark; but on stage there had never been room for hesitation, and Natasha these days was always on stage. 

Sometimes she was in the wings, though. Some performances were less well-attended than others.

In the lavatory of the plane to Tel Aviv she washed her hands in the toy sink and looked in the mirror. Yelena had smelled of strong black samovar-brewed tea. Her hands had been tiny. Sources said that in Moscow she had an auntie and suitors and an apartment with a listed phone number; and when they'd fought in that Zürich side-street Natasha had knocked her down in the snow and Yelena had looked—there was no mistaking that look. Ravenous. Going tooth and nail and fist and boot with the Black Widow made the girl so hard she could hardly think. She hadn't looked like that, had she, fighting Rhapastani henchmen; but under the pier she hadn't even checked Natasha's injuries before kicking her under the water. Natasha wadded a paper towel into the trash slot and thought: well, it would be simple then. Nearly as easy as outwitting a man. 

 

**Rhapastan**  
**February, 1998**

They'd been different, years ago, the dreams. 

Yelena supposed all the Red Room trainees had them. All the girls, surely. At sixteen they'd had the Black Widow's image up in their dormitory: a painting as clear as a photograph. Romanova's perfect mask-like face; her extended hand enveloped in the paw of the great man. You could almost see her curt nod, in the painting, and the play of her red hair around her shoulder. You could almost see her move. She had moved for Yelena (for all of them, no doubt): fighting with her, dodging and thrusting alongside her, her mobile proletarian lips and the flexion of her legs. On the wall, in the morning, there she had remained; and Yelena's chest had ached to look at her. 

Later Ekaterina had laughed. Such things had never happened, surely Yelena knew? Hadn't she ever wondered why they had paintings, and not photographs? Though even photographs, these days… And anyway, Ekaterina said, Gorbachev had never traveled to Kadnikov; and by 1985 Romanova had already had the sense to start living abroad, where she'd get paid; and besides, you could see where the faces had been changed, where some poor bastard had lost favor and been painted out. Did Yelena believe everything she was told? 

Ekaterina moved to London and Yelena stayed in Moscow and the dreams changed, after that.

The Black Widow, kicking out at Yelena with Yelena's knife between her ribs. Her mouth red and dripping, Romanova twisting up off her back in the snow and Yelena bleeding from the hip, snarling back at her. Looking down the barrel of her gun as she looked down the barrel of hers with _Natalia_ falling out of her mouth, _Natalia_ ; and Yelena, standing over a black-clad body with her fists ready and her skin alight and her red hair whipping around her face—

In caravan in Rhapastan Yelena wasn't dreaming. Wasn't sleeping: not on the first mission of her new life. But still, she would jerk fully awake to the tangible sensation of the Black Widow's—of Romanova's body, soft and unresisting under her boot as she rolled her into Lake Zürich. Over, and over, and over. 

So easily, she'd slipped under. After so long.

 

**Basel**  
**February, 1998**

The girl had got herself out of the hot zone, Natasha was sure: thirty hours to the border in a stolen Jeep it would have been, while Natasha had kept her shoes on and her eyes open in the back of the General's private jet. They'd refueled in London and she'd slipped her surveillance; zigzagged to Lyons, Copenhagen, Oslo; and then to Basel where she'd taken a room above a coffee shop run by bohemians high enough and pretty enough that they spared no glances for anyone else. It was about as sparsely attended as Natasha's performances ever got. In her room the beds were separate, the linens starched to perfection. She laid out her gun and her cuffs and her long white knife in a line along the painfully modern vanity; then peeled back the sheets and lay down to wait. 

_Natalia_ , she had called her. _Natalia,_ and before trying again to kill her she had leapt to save her life. As though Natasha would leave it in such tender hands. 

Still, in Zürich, for a bare moment— 

In Zürich Yelena had been shaking, she wanted it so badly: _the Black Widow_. Natasha had lain across the girl's thighs, secure in her own immaculate choreography, and just for a moment, just for the barest moment, thought: she could let Yelena have it. She could slip away, under the water; could seem to all the world to die; could let this rank child crash and burn and the Black Widow codename with her. Yelena _wanted_ it and Natasha—what would be left of Natasha Romanova, if she sloughed off the Black Widow and walked away?

She pulled the covers up under her arms. Rolled onto her side, away from the window. Without conscious effort she knew the tableau she made: light of the full moon and the streetlamps on the back of her white shoulder and the dark red fall of her hair. She made her breathing slow and shallow, inviting; and at the darkest pitch of the morning flipped herself sideways with a kick to the knees of Yelena Belova who, having jimmied open the third-floor window, stood over her with piano wire stretched between her hands.

Teeth in the flesh of the girl's dainty thumb. Legs around her knees; hands on her wrists. She pinned her to the floor and then let her up; Yelena threw a punch with her lip curled up so they went at it again. 

"I would have thought," said Yelena, "you'd be tired," when Natasha had her pushed up against the vanity with her hands behind her back. 

"I'm not getting any younger, you mean." 

"You haven't slept all night." 

"Which means," Natasha said, "neither have you."

They watched each others' faces in the mirror, Yelena's cheek pressed up against the glass. En route from Norway, as a matter of fact, Natasha _had_ let herself doze; later, at the end of the jetway, above a giant digital 13:47, the airport wall had demanded WHAT IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE LOCAL TIME? and she had felt her mouth curl at the edges.

"What part of being lost all the time," Natasha asked, "don't you understand, little one?" and she let her up for another round as the bells of Basel Minster chimed.

 

**Madrid**  
**June, 1998**

From the Red Room Yelena held nothing back, and why would she? Yes, she told them, Romanova is alive. Yes, attempts were made in Rhapastan and Basel; no, they did not succeed; yes, Romanova's loyalties continue traitorous; yes, her bed continues warm. That last, they said, might be useful, not bothering to hide their smirks behind their hands. Did they think so? Yelena answered. In any case she sent me with an olive branch, she told them, and relayed Romanova's offer; and when they asked her for her opinion she advised them to reject it. Romanova is a turncoat, she told them, a traitor and a thief; and as a resource should never be allowed to set terms. Stelyenko hummed. Steepled his fingers. Yelena was dismissed.

The snow melted and the crocuses came up. She scrubbed her apartment until it gleamed. 

Up at five. Weekly meeting: you've earned a vacation, they said; so she let her auntie Olga send her on a date with a Fyodor and another with an Alexi. The latter had a monogrammed handkerchief; very New York, she sneered at him, and later, sitting on the floor in her bathroom in her backless green satin dress, cut the thing into ribbons with her new white knife. In bed by ten. Weekly meeting: Romanova, they told her, was in Omsk to infiltrate the Bisfent Oil headquarters; what approach, in Yelena's opinion, might she take? Yelena provided seven scenarios and counter-strategies ranked in order of likelihood. Capitalist priorities, she said, predictable; and then they kept her in the home office, watching on security cameras as her number-one call succeeded without a hitch. Up at five. Weekly meeting: she would take a desk job in Novgorod at one of the Guskov crime family's front organizations; once there would appropriate plans for near-undetectable flexible body armor from Guskov agents who had recently infiltrated Stark Industries—in whose tower her little girlfriend was vacationing on Stark's dime, had she heard? _Consulting_ , Stelyenko said, and laughed: _is that what she was calling it_. Yelena replied that she supposed there were many benefits to being for sale to the highest bidder; dyed her hair and filled her suitcase with pumps and pencil skirts. In bed by ten.

And then in June, in a vodka bar on the Bolotnaya Embankment, the Red Room's mole at the Spanish embassy, three sheets to the wind, told her very interesting things were happening, very interesting. They were about to squash a spider, he said: they'd turned a Madrileño friend of that poor blind bastard Romanova had let in her pants. Yelena shifted forward. He leered down her blouse. The bitch was in trouble now, he said: it had needed some doing but she'd taken the bait; no way out; he was leading her right into a steel trap set to snap down on her pretty little—

Five hours later, in seat 21F, Yelena's knuckles still hurt. It shouldn't matter. The plot wouldn't succeed. But to send in some man after months, _months_ of keeping Yelena on good behavior, of letting her stagnate behind a desk, of consulting her insight and using her information and then to have this foreigner, this _traitor_ putting his filthy hands around the throat of the Black Widow while Yelena—while Yelena stared unseeing at muted romantic comedies as the passengers around her slept.

Was she a little dog to be kept on a leash? Well: to an alley behind a seven-storey nightclub on the Paseo de Recoletos she tracked the scent. Stopped and panted just long enough to count three men holding Natalia up as two more hit her; kicked her; put their paws on her and then Yelena: like a steel trap, the mole had said, set to snap like bones that under Yelena's hands Yelena's head Yelena's boots went _crack_ _crack_ _crack_ _crack_ _crack_.

Romanova: hands on knees getting her wind back against the brick wall. Her mini-dress was black and her pink lips bloodied and Yelena stood heaving breaths, surrounded by bodies and _craving_ , like something out of a dream.

"Rooskaya," said Romanova. 

Yelena kicked the chest of the closest corpse. "This sack of shit," she said. "This garbage, this is what the Red Room sends to finish you."

"I'm their best agent," said Romanova, straightening up. "The Red Room doesn't want me dead."

"You're not their—"

"I'm the best agent," she corrected, "who they regularly use."

"Suka," said Yelena, and then—burning, incandescent—surged forward, shoulder to Romanova's sternum up against the wall. Romanova went strangely still: small noise in her throat with Yelena's gun to her stomach. 

"I don't care," Yelena told her. "I don't care, I'll do it against orders."

She breathed into Romanova's ragged breath. Shoved the gun harder against her and oh the twist of her mouth. The slow blink of her green eyes. 

"Think of finding you in Madrid, Rooskaya," said Romanova, "in a mood to ignore Red Room orders, and desperate for action thanks to five months behind desks, just when I am here on SHIELD business and in need of discreet help."

Yelena's hand on the gun. Steady.

"What a lucky coincidence," Romanova added, smiling down at her with _five months_ still echoing off the alley walls; five months of—of consultations Romanova had overseen and _desk assignments_ Romanova had kept her on and _coincidence_ Romanova had choreographed with her traitor contacts and _What part of being lost all the time don't you understand?_. Yet Yelena still wanted, couldn't not want, with a sinking in her gut, those bastards dead on the alley ground.

"Interested?" Natalia asked her. 

"Suka," Yelena growled, into Natalia's mouth, and Natalia laughed. 

 

**Outside Sydney**  
**February, 1999**

Dance lessons, Natasha thought of them, at odd moments. At moments when she shouldn't think of them at all.

At three o'clock in the morning, in a cinderblock building in the midst of the baked-dry hills of the Barossa Valley, Natasha had a middle-aged Sydneysider tied to a metal school chair, ringed all around by clear plastic boxes. _Red-bellied black_ , one was labeled, in near-illegible pen scrawl. Another: _Inland taipan_. With her boot she nudged open the top latch of the _lowlands copperhead_ , and Mr. White held very, very still. 

A black-red arrow with a white smudge below: small smooth reptile head poking out of the crack between lid and box. "Nice fellow," Natasha said. She dropped into a crouch and watched it watch her with its amber eyes as across the room the window rattled, and slid up. Natasha got her hand around the nice fellow, just under his skull. 

"Rooskaya," she said, straightening up with the fang-bared head held just over her fist. "Sent again to kill me, no doubt." 

Yelena dropped to the dirt floor and shook out her hair. She neither confirmed nor denied. Probably believed, thought Natasha, that that little concession meant she'd survive as the Black Widow: having learned, since June, occasionally to shut her mouth. 

"Amerikanskaya," Yelena said, mocking. "And Reginald White, I see."

Mr. White didn't like Yelena there and neither did the snake. It opened its mouth wider and Natasha petted the back of its head and thought quickly, with her stomach dropping, as Yelena scanned the room. Metal-wire shelving; clear-glass distillation equipment like martini glasses attached to rubber hosing. (Mr. White's encryption code was specific to Australasia; of no use to Moscow.) Eye-wash safety posters and postcards from Ballarat stuck up with gum on the cinder walls. (Work uninteresting to the Red Room. _Unknown_ to the Red Room.) Rack upon rack of clear plastic tubs. 

"Compiling an extracurricular dossier then, are we?" Natasha said. "What would they think, back home?"

"They said I'd earned a vacation. Like a normal girl." 

"Yeah," Natasha said. "I've heard attempted—"

"Attempted?"

"—murder and espionage are big with the normal girls. There was a movie about it on the plane."

Yelena just smiled. With a gloved hand, from a neat rack by the sanitizer, she picked up a shot glass and one each from a pair of stacks: ligatures and little rubber squares. Natasha let the snake's body curl around Mr. White's shoulders. He was shaking hard enough that the chair rattled against the floor, but he was staring, too. He was listening. A body to dispose of: her back ached.

"Maybe I'm moonlighting," Yelena said.

"You don't," said Natasha.

"I did in Madrid," said Yelena. "Didn't I? Maybe ASIS hired me to stop you getting the encryption code, in exchange for a week in a bikini on Bondi Beach."

Blue eyes. Tossing the shot glass and catching it. If they had, of course, she'd have never suggested it. Yelena Belova didn't freelance or maybe she did, or maybe only when it got her off or maybe only when she was showing how well she learned; but Natasha Romanova, who thought nothing of sullying herself with such things, was meant to know that Yelena knew who for.

"So," Natasha told her. "You can hold a grudge. Shall we pull each others' pigtails, then?" 

"Thought we might scrap." Yelena stretched the rubber square over the shot glass and bound it with the ligature. "Arm-wrestle, or. A contest of skill." 

Snake-like herself, Yelena, with Natasha's movements hampered by the copperhead: at her side in a flash and then catching Natasha's wrist in her strong, tiny hand. Two fingers on the snake-head with her other hand coming up beneath. Fangs squeaked-squeaked, drooling against the rubber, before they sank through. 

"Or a knife fight," said Yelena. She smelled of Moscow, still: samovar-dark tea and her eyes Baikal blue, looking up at Natasha with poison dripping between them; the coil of the snake. Eggwhite liquid seeped down the inside of the glass. Natasha thought, suddenly, of a defector she'd tracked years ago, when she'd been full of aimless fury in the aftermath of Alexi's death, to a forest outside Leningrad. Yelena's hard imperious body against Natasha's body demanded she give, _give_ , and for years she hadn't been able to fathom why that man had looked up at her as she pressed a blade to his throat and had leaned into it just a _touch_ too hard...

All it would take, now, was Natasha relaxing her fist. Her hand tingled with the possibility of it. She could let it go. Could open like a flower and then the Black Widow Yelena Belova would have a snake-head in her hand and dripping all down her wrist she would turn—

"Or fists," Yelena was saying. Her voice was rough. 

—and she would press—

"Or," said Natasha, and cleared her throat, "we could use a switchblade and that cocktail of yours to get the code off this bastard; and then we'll see if I can shake you off my tail on the way back to Sydney."

Yelena's fierce wanting demanding face and Natasha—opening—

"A race," she added, quiet, "without company."

"Well, Mr. White," said Yelena, at last. "How does that sound to you?" 

Mr. White made noises around his gag. Yelena stepped back, pulling away with her glass of venom and leaving Natasha's side cool and shivery and her fist still clenched as Yelena reached down to the harness at her thigh like Natasha's harness at Natasha's thigh and brought out a long white knife. 

 

**Portland**  
**May 1999**

Through the skylight of a youth hostel on a street that smelled of patchouli, Yelena looked down at Natalia getting into disguise. 

Three minutes on a library computer an hour before had got Yelena into the records of the charity event Stelyenko's Pacific-coast mole would be attending that evening. Ellen Bell, Yelena manufactured her invite to read; and she'd smiled, hand to her already-costumed chest, to see _Natalie Rushman_ tucked surreptitiously onto the list a few names down. Two more minutes and she'd dug up Natalie's lodgings. "Your Eco Home Away From Home!" the website proclaimed. Natalia, Yelena thought, would be dying for a proper shower.

In front of the mirror down in her eco room, Natalia was putting prostheses in her cheeks; putty about her nose. Long ratted black wig over an orange peasant blouse and a brown skirt. Boots inescapably purple. Eyeshadow to match. Yelena unlatched the skylight, and when Natalia looked up at her, oddly frozen, she launched herself through the opening and knocked her to the ground on general principle, thighs around Natalia's neck, hands on her wig, then in her hair, then knees hitting the floor. 

"Rooskaya," Natalia said, and Yelena said "Amerikanskaya," pivoting, breathless, and: "What are you _doing_ to yourself?" 

Elbows; fists; they rolled toward the window in a mess of legs and hard hands. Yelena got in a knee to the solar plexus and Natalia grunted; elbow to Yelena's cheekbone and her head whipped around and she was panting. Since Hong Kong, had it been? The feel of fighting Natalia fighting her. Tooth and claw. 

"Hanson?" Natalia gasped. Hand to Yelena's wrist to the floor. Yelena twisted her hips under her; turned half onto her front so she could get her elbow back into Natalia's ribs. 

"Fury caught on, has he," she asked her, "that she's leaking information?"

"Stelyenko caught on to the same?" 

Allies, then, more or less; still Yelena twisted and bucked; knee to Natalia's stomach again and she rolled them. Fists and nails to leave marks. When they came to rest Yelena had Natalia up against the wall, elbow to her throat and both of them breathing harsh into each others' harsh breath; faces inches apart. Yelena didn't have her cuffs. Didn't have her gun. Had nothing but her hands and hips and she pressed into Natalia pressing away from the wall. She let herself groan. Let herself grin. 

"What is that, burlap?" she asked. Knee between Natalia's legs and the rough fabric was digging into her bare leg. "You think this is a folk festival, or—?"

"You think it's a joke?" 

Natalia's chest was rising-falling and her eyes gestured: head to foot. Yelena's face went hot. She relaxed back a fraction; enough for Natalia to get her own hand out from behind her back and move it high up on Yelena's thigh, under her black mini-dress. Black heels; pink lips and she'd had her hair dyed across the river. It wasn't, she thought defensively, the _same_ red. Not exactly.

"I didn't know you'd be here. I can—"

"Stupid."

"—change."

Natalia looked down at her with bruise-dark eyes and didn't move her hand. Her fingers tensed against Yelena's skin. Against her thigh and her ass and Natalia didn't speak; Yelena could feel her pulse at four different points of contact and thought she could make a feast for her. Be drunk by her. Open her up and crawl inside beating, _beating_ as Natalia's eyes got darker and darker and Yelena Belova slipped into her blood and was transformed. And then, she thought, in Moscow the Black Widow would flip a switch on a closed-circuit monitor; and the room would go dark. 

Natalia's palm, higher by an inch. Yelena gasped. 

"No," Natalia said. She breathed in, deep, and took back her hand. "It's all right. Don't bother to change."

Yelena shut her mouth and Natalia moved away from her. From behind a folding-screen etched with salmon, Yelena heard metal teeth unzip.

"I would offer you vodka," Natalia called, "or wine. But I hear you don't, do you?"

Eyes and ears, Yelena thought. She sat at one of the chairs next to the small table. Stood up. Sat again. "No," she said, "I don't," though she wanted to. Wanted Natalia to ask.

"We may as well coordinate," Natalia said. "If you're going to this dinner tonight. We can work together."

Yelena ran a hand through her un-red hair and nodded. Nodded. 

"Rooskaya?" 

"Da," she said, "Yes."

"Hanson's smart," said Natalia, "and brazen. And unfortunately for us straight as an arrow, to all indications. Still. Since we're both here. Four hands always better than two. We'll need to think—"

And she talked and Yelena waited for the exaltation. Allies, she thought; compatriots; and tried to conjure Comrade Romanova in all the glory of her proletarian brow and her strong legs pounding into battle next to Yelena's legs pounding into the battle, but in Madrid Natalia had said _Interested?_ and in Basel and in Hong Kong and in Sydney she'd arched beneath Yelena, thrown her and bruised her, fought her blow for blow just to the edge of Yelena's strength and two steps farther and then farther, far enough that Yelena all year had _ached_ —

"—won't want to draw attention," Natalia was saying, but: "Were you ever in Kadnikov?" Yelena interrupted. "Did you ever. Did you ever shake hands with Gorbachev, in Kadnikov?"

Behind the screen the susurrations paused. "In my day," said Natasha, slowly, "it was Brezhnev in that picture."

Yelena's sweating palms. Her nails done in pink trimmed short like Natalia's pink and short-trimmed. "Brezhnev," she repeated. Laughed. Zippers again, and quiet clanking and breath. 

"Stalin," said Natalia, at last. 

"I used to have dreams," said Yelena, in a rush, "I used to have dreams—"

"I know, little one," said Natalia, and her voice— "eyes and ears," rough-edged and strangely hopeless, coming around the edge of the screen in backless green satin, with a blonde wig curling around her shoulders. Yelena looked at her and shut her mouth on her stomach in her throat, and Romanova said, "Next time, Rooskaya, bring your knife."

 

**Paris**  
**August 1999**

Already knowing about New York; already having toppled the first domino in her chain, she ought to have stuck to the plan. She supposed, sometimes, a person felt awfully mortal; but the Black Widow was too old for excuses like that.

Still, it was one in the morning. Still, in her laboriously picturesque student digs in the Quartier Latin, with the mission mostly finished and her cover-act tiresome and her favorite lipstick gone missing, she emptied her bag onto the bed and something fluttered out on top. She picked it up, turned it over: the business card Matt had given her back in '97, with a fake name and the number of that old flip phone Yelena had taken off her in Zürich. In New York, a plague cloud gathered over 1313 Avenue B; this was no part of it, yet still she stood fingering the tattered card stock. Chris Diver, it said: Attorney at Law. To someone watching through the window, or through the ducts, Chris would seem a lover, or an ex-lover. Natasha's cover-act would close her eyes, tears welling up, and think how she was in Paris without Chris. Natasha closed hers to visions of computer-generated portrait mockups; surgical equipment; and Fury's raised eyebrows as she'd sat across from him in Washington and presented cold logic and lukewarm rationalization and nothing, nothing at all about the way, in Sydney and Hong Kong and Madrid, she'd been hypnotized by the wrong end of Belova's gun. 

She flipped down the card's dog-eared corner. Nobody held onto a phone, anyway, for a year and a half after anyone had stopped paying the bill.

She still dialed, though. Didn't she. 

Yelena was in Milan and she was working—really working, short of breath with footfalls on pavement and the unmistakable sound of splintering wood coming through on the line after she picked up on the fourth ring and sounded—God. Quite simply and terrifyingly _glad Natasha had called_. 

"What are you doing," said Natasha, "with this old thing?" 

"What are you doing calling it?" said Yelena, and Natasha, with Fury's underground hospital room in her mind's eye, had no choice but to tell a story. An unexpected mess, the story went. Backup, it continued. 

"Urgent?" said Yelena, to the sound of glass breaking.

"No." 

"Are you sure?" with sirens wailing in the background.

"On second thought," said Natasha, "forget it. It's nothing, I can—" 

"Pizduk," said Yelena, "I'll be there, ten hours," and hung up. Natasha, since any audience members would be more or less expecting it by this advanced stage of the production, allowed herself to throw her phone at the wall, and to consider tears. A deep breath. Overkill, she decided. She retrieved the phone, retreated to the bathroom, and then, after minutes, crawled between the sheets. 

Six hours later she woke up to Yelena perched on the side of her bed with the French doors open a crack to the courtyard, inspecting Natasha's compact with the hidden chamber designed to conceal a floppy disk. 

"You said ten hours," said Natasha, sleep-muddled, and then, pushing up on an elbow as Yelena looked up and let her blue eyes bore through Natasha's sheet, "You didn't try to kill me."

"I know," said Yelena. She grinned and tossed the compact to the floor and straddled her. "You're disappointed," she said, and Natasha groaned. "Do you like it," Yelena asked her, her face close to Natasha's face, "when I show up with a gun in my hand?" 

Morning light through blonde curls and eyes like Baikal ice, and Natasha, with a strange premonitory double vision, let herself look; let herself writhe. Yelena in a full black catsuit like Natasha's full black catsuit; while Natasha, as Yelena knew, slept in the nude. 

"A gun, now," Natasha said, "I don't know. Last time it was garrotting wire."

"Mmm," said Yelena. She pushed Natasha's hair back; kept touching her face with her gloves still on. Cuffs like Natasha's cuffs; Natasha nuzzled the one against her cheek. 

"I liked the poisoned darts," said Yelena, and Natasha laughed.

"Drama queen." 

Leather-clad fingers at Natasha's lips; she took them on her tongue. Yelena's mouth was open in sympathy with Natasha's mouth open around her glove like Natasha's gloves. Natasha's heart was going too fast but—gloves—so she pressed her hips up between Yelena's thighs and Yelena's breath came rough. 

"Have you turned over a new leaf?" Natasha said. Wet leather petting her cheek, her hair. "Are you letting me live now in deference to my—my, my personal charms?"

Yelena moaned; let her palms slam down on either side of Natasha's face and she ground down into her while Natasha pressed up and closed her eyes. A face pixelated on a clicking computer screen so she opened them again and pressed up onto her elbows and Yelena kissed her mouth open with her panting-open mouth.

"You were working," Yelena told her. "You'd called, you'd—oh _god_ —called me out on a job and they'd know, wouldn't they."

Natasha's too-fast heart, "That's what I'd have thought," licking her lips, "that's how I'd have planned it exactly, if I were you," and Yelena said again "kind of a giveaway if you just, oh, just—" _please_ Natasha thought, _yes, god_ "—just disappeared—"

A shadow at the window and Natasha moaned. She let herself roll Yelena, take her by surprise and get her back on the mattress and her golden-blonde hair spread out like Natasha's hair on Natasha's pillow as the glass of the French door shattered and Yelena gasped and gasped and they sprang into action. 

Guns, as it happened. Prosaic, Yelena no doubt found them: Yelena in her catsuit like Natasha's catsuit with her cuffs like Natasha's cuffs, and Natasha in the Baikal-blue dressing gown she'd grabbed off the nightstand, with her small traveling arsenal and her heart going like crazy. A few minutes' scuffle and they'd laid out six men and broken all the furniture in the apartment, and Yelena had Natasha down on the floor with her long white knife against Natasha's ribs.

"Now," Yelena panted, "they won't make a fuss." 

"No," Natasha said, and didn't move. In the distance the sirens were already wailing and her heart was beating out of her chest. "Now I would do it," she said. Eyes to the knife. "If I were you."

In the early-morning light she looked up into blonde pink blue and gold, rounded cheekbones soft forehead lips; the face she'd sat with Fury's men and broken down angle by angle, _shoulders a bit narrower_ , she'd said, like running her palms over them bare in Munich; _lips fuller_ like kissing them in Taipei 'til they'd been swollen and wet; and for weeks Natasha'd kept clippings of her own hair, to dye and dye until the hue was just that golden glow and Yelena's eyes—

"Now," Natasha whispered, and pressed up into her own knife, her long white knife in the Black Widow's hand; and Yelena's whole face went hungry and shocked-empty and Natasha felt her arm tense and she closed her eyes and her front went cold and the French door crashed against the wall and Yelena was out in the the courtyard and away. 

And Natasha's heart; and Natasha's heart. And Natasha's heart.

The sirens were nearing. She rolled over, away from the glass; stripped out of her dressing-gown and her false blood pack and the near-undetectable flexible body armor Stark had built her back in May, as a lark, at the Tower. She'd never, she reflected, slept in it before. Jeans. T-shirt. Ankle-holster and her motorcycle jacket and she shimmied down the fire escape and walked away. She'd have to tell Tony, she thought, that it started to chafe after the fourth hour. Now that she wouldn't be disappearing, now that she wouldn't be (stopping at a news kiosk, tears in her eyes, _stupid_ ) whoever she would have been, if there were no more Romanova. Now that Yelena wouldn't be killing her and probably dying in glory with the Black Widow codename; now that Yelena had left and Natasha would be going back to New York and—

The fastener clicked when you moved. Natasha would have to tell him. The next time she saw him, she would have to say.

 

**Manhattan**  
**September 1999**

In Kiev at her parents' house only it wasn't her parents' house, she was pulled away from the party by that Victor, no, Vitaly, the one who'd always borrowed her notes in school; and as he pulled her up the stairs to the attic Yelena tried to think whether she'd already talked to him tonight; but her head was heavy and groggy and—as a matter of fact, she thought, who could possibly have invited him, after all this time? was it Olga? did she intend a match? and then, Yelena wondered, stumbling up the stairs, was Olga down at the party herself? Had Yelena yet talked to _her_? Would she be hurt that her grand-niece had gone off on her own, up to this attic where—where, as it happened, Yelena now found herself completely alone. There was something that she ought to get back to; but here she stood before a kind of a weapon she was sure she'd never seen before, ancient or possibly unimaginably modern or possibly alive, covered as it was in engravings she couldn't read; and the hour seemed suddenly very, very late as, exerting an enormous effort, she lifted her hand to touch the thing and it crumbled to dust before her eyes—

And there was a kind of a groaning sound in the room. Her limbs _were_ heavy; she moved them under the sheets. Sunlight came bright through her eyelids and she tried to remember back: weekly meeting at the Red Room; then tea with Galina and then… nothing. 

The groaning sound, she realized, was coming from her own chest. With a focused effort she made it stop. Her splitting head: had she somehow been _drinking_? She put her hands over her eyes. Weekly meeting at the Red Room; tea with Galina; she'd got a stain on her red scarf and when she'd got home she'd listened to Olga's message on her machine and then that strange dream. Yelena rolled over and breathed in familiar hair oil and deodorant and thought _It makes a change, anyway; to dream of something other than Natalia_ and suddenly was vertical, electric, sitting up with her eyes watering in the light.

It was all right. I would be all right. Still dreaming, she had to be. 

Eyes wide, wide as she could make them: she was naked but Natalia always slept naked; in Natalia's bed smelling of Natalia's hair oil and Natalia's deodorant but those were flavors Yelena kept in her lungs now and on her tongue and in her tingling skin against Natalia's well-known sheets with her fingers on Natalia's books and then, getting up, on a photograph of Natalia in another life with another assassin as Yelena's chest went tighter and tighter turning to the window and Natalia's view of Natalia's city, which Yelena with her galloping pulse had seen from flophouses and rowhouses and penthouse suites but never from quite this breathless angle; and in Natalia's bathroom as her insides clenched the sounds in her pounding panicking head (and the mirror, Natalia in the mirror like a blade in her side) of someone much heavier than Yelena, moving around.

 

**Governors Island**  
**September 1999**

In the little antechamber off the main surveillance room, next to the bed where she'd slept in the week since her death, Natasha had ordered a mirror installed and a lock on the door. Fury's man had snorted before he thought better of it, and that night at the bar, she was sure, his buddies had bought him a beer at the way he'd no doubt said _Women!_ eyes to heaven. It didn't matter. The Black Widow's vanity, or lack thereof, was hardly relevant to the subject at hand.

At hand. Her eyes snapped open like always but she didn't look; not until she'd switched on the lamp on the bedside table. Then she turned. Looked. Watched Yelena Belova in her Baikal blue nightgown turn down the covers and get out of bed. 

The job was passable, she thought. Nothing could be done about Natasha's height, or the size of her shoulders or her hands; but the eyes they'd matched well: months of vetting shade after shade of thirty-day contacts in Stark's labs. And the blonde halo, the consistency of the sleep-tousled curls were just the same as the night in Munich when they'd been surprised in their bed and Yelena had gunned down their adversary with pillow-creases still in her cheek. And the face they'd cut down under the knife. And the nose. She let her nightgown pool on the floor and now there was more to critique: her breasts smaller, yes; her thighs more wiry, and they'd seen to the stretch marks on Natasha's belly; but bargaining on her ability to distract any participants in a striptease and dispose of any in a strip search, they'd neglected the mole on Yelena's left hip; the scar on her right thigh. A knife wound, Natasha had surmised in Hong Kong, pressing her tongue into it as Yelena's breath went ragged. But a knife wound incurred where? Why? Red Room training? A childhood fight? Self-inflicted? Natasha Romanova had never asked, and now she'd almost certainly never be told. 

Anyway, the scar was gone. Natasha touched Yelena's body in the mirror: fresh and clean and unmarked. Like nothing had ever happened to her, before the Black Widow. 

From the shadows a voice said, "I know that smell," and Natasha wondered why she'd bothered about the lock. Surrounded by SHIELD agents, half of whom had superhuman abilities and she herself thinking nothing of Fort Knox before breakfast. But a bitter taste in her mouth: of all the possible observers. 

"Getting distracted?" said Matt. "Can I help?" and Natasha cleared her throat. Wished he could see her. Wished he'd be shocked, cowed the way the rest of them were, by her blonde hair and her tiny body and her blue blue eyes. They hadn't been able to do anything about her voice, either, but she could change that herself. 

"I can't think of a thing you can do," she said.

"Of course not," Matt said, and then, conversationally, "I haven't slept for twenty hours."

"No?"

"You smell like you just got a solid six. Wouldn't want to neglect your beauty sleep now that they tell me you're twenty-two again and blonde and naive."

"Matt."

"What if she'd swapped out for another gun, Nat?" he said. "What if she'd brought her own bullets? Got you at close range?"

"I had an entire team of—"

"I had a bug on that phone," he said. 

"For how long?" she said. "Since you gave it to me?" but he told her, "Yelena didn't leave it in Milan."

So.

The little room, she thought, was stifling. She looked at herself in the mirror with her heart plodding along and the woman in the mirror looked back; pulled on jeans and a t-shirt and sweater and he no doubt knew by the sounds that she was leaner, lighter. Less weighed down by the past. 

"Why are you doing this," said Matt. 

Blonde strands in the comb. She teased her part straight and arranged her curls.

"You provoked her into an attack at knifepoint," Matt said, "and you, what, you weren't going to fight back? She could have gone for your throat, cut your jugular, left you bleeding out on the floor, you didn't think about that?"

"Yeah," said Natasha. "I thought about it."

She put back the comb on the side-table and sat down in her clothes in her new skin on the edge of her borrowed cot. She rubbed her neck. _I would have thought you'd be tired_ , someone had told her once, and she'd said, _You mean I'm not getting any younger._

"She'll never forgive you," said Matt, and Yelena, in the mirror, said, "I know."


End file.
